Chris Bathgate is a big-hearted singer-songwriter that hasn’t seemed to even touched the sides of the wider musical consciousness. More’s the pity because he is the genuine article, a million miles away from the earnest-but-dull Mumford, or the tubthumping do-gooding Frank Turner (for more on that , read this).
Although his Wikipedia claims a raft of albums dating back to 2003, it is only his 2008 effort A Cork Tale Wake that we have any knowledge of. Barely making a mark over here or in the States, it is an album that should have ensured Bathgate got more coverage than he did, though perhaps that year every solo folk singer got caught in the wake of a certain Mr Vernon and the definitive For Emma, Forever Ago.
Album opener Serpentine is simplicity itself- a voice, a piano, a gloomy cello and a melody that ensures it once it’s in it won’t leave. Like his best moments, all the best moments really, it is an exercise in quiet melancholy, fragile instrumentation and bittersweet lyrics- “your thin frame has set my eyes to fray on our dim stretch of this street.”
If you were to sum up Bathgate in one word, bittersweet is probably it. Obviously the title of A Cork Tale Wake hints that this in an album concerned with passing and sadness, as do songs like The Last Parade on Ann St and The Last Wine of Winter. But the gloom is offset by a sense of wide-eyed adolesence inherent in the gleeful trumpet on Restless and the blues-y growl of the guitar on Smells Like A Fist. This comes to the fore with album highlight Do What’s Easy, which might just be the most beautiful paean to misguided youth we’ve ever heard- “smoke cigarettes ‘til your chest rattles like hell/just do what’s easy.” A weepy violin and acoustic interlude briefly follows, before Bathgate rasps “forget your debts ‘cos forgiveness exists.” If you can get through that without getting a shiver in your soul, then you probably haven’t got one.
For fans of:
Bon Iver, Sufjan Stevens, Damien Jurado.
Posted In They Shoulda Been Huge, Feb 21 2011.
Words - David